THE PRESIDENTS
On each side there was one man who stood at the storm center, trying to lead a people who would follow no leader for long unless they felt in him some final embodiment of the deep passions and misty insights that moved them. This man was the President, given power and responsibility beyond all other men, hemmed in by insistent crowds yet always profoundly alone - Abraham Lincoln, in Washington, and Jefferson Davis, in Richmond.
They were very different, these two, alike only in their origins and in the crushing weight of the burdens they carried. On each rested an impossible imperative - to adjust himself to fate and yet at the same time somehow to control it. Miracles were expected of them by an age which had lost its belief in the miraculous.
Davis was all iron will and determination, a rigid man who might conceivably be broken but who could never be bent, proud almost to arrogance and yet humbly devoted to a cause greater than himself. Of the rightness of that cause he had never a doubt, and it was hard for him to understand that other men might not see that rightness as he did. Essentially a legalist, he had been put in charge of the strangest of revolutions - an uprising of conservatives who would overturn things in order to preserve a cherished status quo - and he would do his unwavering best to make the revolution follow the proper forms. He had had much experience with politics, yet it had been the experience of the aristocrat-in-politics. He had never known the daily immersion in the rough-and-tumble of ward and courthouse politics, where the candidate is hammered into shape by repeated contact with the electorate.
There were other handicaps, the greatest being the fact that the kind of government Southerners wanted was not the kind that could fight and win an extended war. The administration had to have broad wartime powers, but when Davis tried to get and use them he was bitterly criticized; fighting against strong centralized government, he had to create such a government in order to win. States' rights made an impossible base for modern war. The doctrinaire was forever tripping up the realist.
Nor was that all. Davis' cabinet gave him little help. It contained some good men, the ablest perhaps being Judah P. Benjamin, a lawyer and former senator from Louisiana. He served, successively, as Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. He was a brilliant man and a hard worker, wholly devoted to the cause, and Davis trusted him and relied on him as much as a man of Davis' bristling independence could be said to rely on anyone. Other men, in the cabinet and out of it, seemed to feel that Benjamin was just a little too clever, and he was never able to bring a broad national following to the President's support. Another good man, underestimated at the time, was Stephen Mallory of Florida, the Secretary of the Navy. Mallory had very little to work with, and the Confederacy's total inability to break the strangling blockade brought him much unjust criticism, but he did a good deal better with the materials at hand than there was any reason to expect. He and John H. Reagan of Texas, the Postmaster General, were the only two who held their cabinet posts from the Confederacy's birth to its death. There were six secretaries of war, and the one who held the job the longest was James A. Seddon of Virginia; like those who preceded and followed him, Seddon found his path made difficult by the fact that Davis to all intents and purposes was his own Secretary of War.
Broadly speaking, the cabinet was undistinguished, and it never contained the South's strongest men. Alexander Stephens was Vice-President, as isolated in that office as an American Vice-President invariably is; Howell Cobb was never a member, Robert Toombs was in the cabinet only briefly, and as a general thing the cabinet did not contain the men who had been most influential in bringing about secession in the first place - the men who, just before the separation took place, would have been regarded as the South's strongest leaders. More and more as the war went on the Confederate government was a one-man show.
In the sense that the President was always dominant, the Northern government too was a one-man show, but in reality it was a team of powerful men - a team which was unruly, stubborn, and hard to manage, but which provided a great deal of service. Lincoln put in his cabinet men of force and ability, and although some of them fought against him at times and tried to wrest leadership from him, they added strength to his administration. Lincoln had a suppleness which Davis lacked, his political experience had taught him how to win a political fight without making personal enemies out of the men he defeated, and he had as well the ability to use the talents of self-assured men who considered themselves his betters.
William H. Seward, his Secretary of State, had opposed him for the Republican Presidential nomination, entered the cabinet reluctantly, and believed that he rather than Lincoln would actually run the show. Lincoln quickly disillusioned him on this point and then made a loyal supporter of him. Edwin M. Stanton, who became Secretary of War after Simon Cameron had demonstrated his own abysmal unfitness for the post, was harsh, domineering, ruthless, forever conniving with the radical Republicans to upset Lincoln's control of high policy; yet he, like Seward, finally came to see that the President was boss, and he was an uncommonly energetic and able administrator. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, was another man who had sought the Republican Presidential nomination in 1860 and who, failing to get it, believed firmly that the better man had lost. He had no conception of the loyalty which a cabinet member might be supposed to owe the President who had appointed him, and in 1864 he tried hard, while still in Lincoln's cabinet, to take the nomination away from him. But if he was a difficult man to get along with, he ran the Treasury Department ably; after removing him for unendurable political insubordination in 1864, Lincoln a few months later showed how highly he regarded Chase's services by making him Chief Justice of the United States.
Thus both Lincoln and Davis had to face intense political opposition as the war progressed. To sum up the quality of their respective cabinets, it can only be said that in the face of this opposition Lincoln's cabinet was in the long run a help to him, and that Davis' cabinet was not.
GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS
One queer aspect of the political phase of the war was the fact that it was the government at Richmond which was first and boldest in its assertion of centralized control over the armies. Despite the states' rights theory, the Confederate government became a truly national government, as far as matters like conscription were concerned, much earlier and much more unequivocally than the government at Washington.
When the war began, Confederate soldiers were enlisted for a term of twelves months, which meant that in the spring of 1862 the Confederate armies were in danger of dissolving. The administration and the Congress met this problem head-on, putting through a conscription act which placed exclusive control over all male citizens between eighteen and thirty-five in the hands of the Confederate President. With certain specified exceptions and exemptions, all men within those age limits were conscripted for the duration of the war. Some of the state governors, most notably the egregious Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, complained bitterly that this was a body blow at constitutional liberties, but the President and Congress were unmoved. There might be widespread complaint about the exemptions under the law - the owner or overseer of twenty slaves, for instance, could not be called into military service - and in the latter part of the war there was trouble enforcing the conscription act properly, but the act itself was courageous and straightforward, and it went unmodified.
It was the Northern government that found itself unable to assert adequate central control over the lives of its citizens, and although it was driven to conscription in 1863, it never was as bold or direct about it as the government at Richmond had been, and it never adopted as good a law.
Northern armies were composed of regiments raised by the several states, and the volunteer signed up, usually, for a three-year term. When new men were needed the Federal government set a total and assigned a quota to each state, and each state quota in turn was broken down into quotas for the separate Congressional districts. If any district or state could fill its quota with volunteers, there would be no draft, and since the draft was extremely unpopular, every state, town, and county did its best to promote volunteering. This led to the indefensible bounty system, which was enormously expensive and did the Union armies more harm than good. A state would offer a cash bounty for enlistments, cities and townships and counties would add their own contribution, the Federal government would make a further offer - and by 1864 there were many areas in which a man could receive more than a thousand dollars simply for joining the army.
The results were almost uniformly vicious. Men who had no intention of rendering any service at the front would enlist, collect their bounty, desert at the first opportunity, reenlist under another name in some other locality, collect another bounty, desert again, and go on with the process indefinitely - the "bounty jumpers," who were detested by the veterans soldiers and who brought the very dregs of society into the army. Even when the high-bounty man did not desert, he did the cause little good; he was in the army because he was offered a great deal of money, not because of any patriotic impulse, and late in the war General Grant estimated that not one in eight of the high-bounty recruits ever did any useful service at the front.
On top of this, the draft act contained a couple of grotesque monstrosities. A drafted man could obtain exemption by paying a commutation fee of three hundred dollars; or, if he preferred - as well he might, since the exemption thus gained would last only until a new draft was called - he could hire a substitute to go to war in his place, thus obtaining permanent release from military service. The government could hardly have devised a worse law. It put the load on the poor man and gave special favors to the well-to-do, and it brought some very poor material into the army. The substitute broker - the dealer who, for a price, would find substitutes for well-heeled draft dodgers - would take any men he could get, and some of them were mentally or physically defective. Through bribery, the broker could often get these men accepted, but they were not of much use to the army.
All in all, the conscription law was an atrocity. Comparatively few men were actually drafted; the one virtue of the law was that it stimulated recruiting, and although the volunteers it brought in were by no means the equals of the men who had enlisted in 1861 and 1862, the army could make do with them. The high-bounty laws did have one good effect. Veteran soldiers whose three-year terms were expiring often reenlisted because the preferred bounty and the furlough that went with reenlistment looked attractive. In the final year of the war the heaviest part of the military load was carried by the old regiments which were entitled to denominate themselves "veteran volunteers."
That he accepted things like the bounty system and the conscription law simply indicates that Lincoln was always prepared to make political compromises to keep the war machine moving. He managed to keep his cabinet under moderately good control, and all things considered he got along with the Congress and with the state governors a good deal better than Davis was able to do. But the road was never smooth, and his problems multiplied as the war progressed. There were recurring cabinet crises. Lincoln had to hold the support of the radicals who followed Chase and Stanton and of the moderates who followed Seward, and there were times when it seemed all but impossible to head off an open break between the leaders of these factions. The innumerable political generals raised similar problems. Such men as Ben Butler, Nathaniel P. Banks, Franz Sigel, and John Charles Fremont were very poor generals indeed, but they held the confidence of large groups of citizens, and in the intricate game of war-plus-politics which Lincoln had to play it seemed, rightly or wrongly, that these generals must be retained in the government's service. The fearsome Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was forever trying to interfere in the setting of administration policy and in control of the armies; it was necessary for Lincoln to retain control without driving the energetic spell-binders who composed this committee into open opposition.
THE ELECTION OF 1864
Lincoln was an adroit politician of extraordinary suppleness and agility. He had to be one, in 1864 especially, because there was about to be a Presidential election, and in the history of the world there had never been a canvass quite like this one. Never before had a democratic nation prepared to hold free elections while it was in the midst of a bloody attempt to win a violent civil war, and the results were unpredictable. As spring gave way to summer and autumn drew near it became increasingly apparent that when it voted on the Presidency, the nation might in effect be voting whether to drop out of the war or carry on to victory at any cost.
The Republicans would of course support Lincoln, even though the party's radicals wanted someone who would wage war with more vigor and with more bitterness. Secretary Chase's bid for the nomination had failed, and although a third party tried to advance General Fremont, it got nowhere, and Fremont presently withdrew. Lincoln was renominated, by a party which called itself the Union party in deference to the support it was getting from the War Democrats, and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was named as his running mate. Lincoln would make no election campaign. What had been done in the war would, of necessity, be the principal issue. Fighting to defeat him for reelection, the Democrats would have great difficulty to keep from fighting for a different sort of war effort; and since the people who wanted a harder war were bound to support Lincoln, the Democrats were apt to speak, or at least to appear to speak, for a softer war - which, under the circumstances, would be likely to mean no war at all.
A great many people in the North were completely disillusioned about the war. Federal troops had to be used, in Ohio and Illinois and elsewhere, to put down uprisings provoked by the draft act; and New York City went through a few bloody days just after the Battle of Gettysburg when mobs stormed draft offices, killed or beat up any Negroes they could find, battled police and soldiers, and in general acted like revolutionists. The riots were at last suppressed, after combat troops had been sent in from the Army of the Potomac, but a thousand civilians had been killed or wounded and an immense amount of property had been destroyed, and the riots were a fearful symptom of deep underlying unrest and discontent. The 1864 Presidential election offered this discontent a chance to show its full strength.
In August the Democrats held their convention in Chicago, and the Copperhead wing was, if not in full control, very active and exceedingly vocal. (Copperhead: one of the anti-war Democrats, who wore in their lapels Indian heads cut from copper pennies.) They dictated a platform which declared the war a failure and called for reestablishment of the Union on the old basis, which amounted to an open confession of lack of will to go on fighting. They accepted the nomination of General McClellan as Presidential candidate, while George H. Pendleton of Ohio, friend of the Copperhead leader, Clement Vallandigham, was named for the Vice-Presidency. Then they sat back and waited for nationwide war weariness and disillusionment to do the job.
It appeared that they might have things figured correctly. With the summer coming to a close, the campaigns that had begun in the spring did look like failures. Neither Lee nor Johnston had been beaten, neither Richmond nor Atlanta had been taken, a Confederate army had recently menaced Washington itself, casualty lists were higher than they had ever been before, the administration had recently called for a new draft of 500,000 men, and Lincoln himself privately believed that he could not be reelected. He believed, additionally, that if he were defeated, the man who beat him would win the election on terms which would make it humanly impossible to win the war; and although McClellan disavowed the peace plank in the Democratic platform and refused to say that the war was a failure, the Lincoln-McClellan contest was generally accepted as a test of the North's willingness to go on with the fight.
One factor in the public's war weariness was the presence of many thousands of Northern soldiers in Southern prison camps, where living conditions were atrocious and the death rate was alarmingly high. In the first years of the war the opposing governments had operated on a system of prisoner exchanges, by which prisoners were periodically repatriated on a man-for-man basis. This system had broken down by the time 1864 began, and when Grant took control of the Union armies he refused to put it in repair. The North now held more prisoners than the South held, and the manpower shortage was hurting the Confederacy much more than it hurt the Union. With lucid but pitiless logic Grant argued that to resume exchanges would simply reinforce the Confederate armies. (It would also reinforce the Federal armies, but these would be reinforced anyway, and the Confederate armies would not.) Unionists in Southern prison camps, therefore, would have to stay there, and if they died like flies - from dysentery, typhoid, malnutrition, and homesick despair complicated by infected quarters - that was regrettable but unavoidable.
In actual fact the Union prisoners of war were very little worse off than the Southerners who were held in Northern prisons, but most people in the North did not realize this and would not have been consoled if they had realized it. All prison camps were death traps in that war. They were overcrowded, reeking from lack of sanitation, badly policed; housing was bad, food was worse, and medical care was sometimes worst of all. This was due less to any active ill-will on either side than to the general, unintended brutality and heartlessness of war. Army life in those days was rough, even under the best conditions, and disease killed many more men than bullets killed; in a prison camp this roughness was inevitably intensified (26,436 Southerners and 22,576 Northerners died in prison camps) even though nobody really meant it so.
No one in the North tried to analyze any of this in the summer of 1864. Heartsick parents could see only that their boys were dying in prisons because the administration, for some inscrutable reason, was refusing to bring them home. Grant was fighting the war on the theory that the North could stand heavier losses than the South could stand, and Lincoln was supporting him, but the immediate fruits of this policy did not make good election-campaign material.
Davis had no campaign problems that summer. The Confederate Constitution set the President's term at six years and ruled out a second term, and Davis did not need to ask for anybody's vote. He was devoting a good part of his attention, with a good deal of skill, to the task of making war-weary Northerners feel the burden of the war, and he was using for this purpose a device which a later generation would know as a fifth column.
THE FIFTH COLUMN
This fifth column was directed from bases in neutral Canada, where certain Confederate emissaries, their operations amply financed by the sale of cotton, kept in touch with agents in the Northern states. They were in touch also with a good many of the Copperhead leaders, and they worked closely with a strange, amorphous, and slightly unreal secret society known variously as the Order of American Knights or the Sons of Liberty: a pro-Confederate peace organization which had proliferated all across the Middle West, claiming hundreds of thousands of members and supposedly preparing to take up arms against the Federal government. The plots that were laid for armed uprisings never came to anything - there was one scheme for a wholesale prison delivery in the Northern states, but it died a-borning - but their existence was an open secret, and the whole business tended to spread defeatist talk and defeatist feelings across the North as nothing else could have done. The fifth column attempted other things - to burn New York City, to capture a warship on the Great Lakes, to destroy railroad bridges, and to enrich the Confederacy with money taken from Yankee banks - and although the actual results were small, the program itself was as desperate as anything a modern fifth columnist would be likely to attempt.
Although Jefferson Davis lacked Lincoln's political address, he was adapting himself to the war situation with real skill. He was, to repeat, a legalist, insisting that the revolution which he led was in fact no revolution at all but something fully sanctioned by constitution and law; but he was laying his hands on a revolutionary weapon with genuine earnestness and ruthless energy, and it was no fault of his that the great fifth-column movement of 1864 came to so little. If the Northern Copperhead leaders had been able to deliver on a fifth of their promises, the Confederacy might that summer have given the Northern home front a good deal more than it could conveniently handle.
The Presidential campaign of 1864 was, all in all, about the most crucial political contest in American history, but it was a campaign in which what men said made very little difference. Speeches were of small account. It was what the men in uniform did that mattered. The war effort was alleged to be a failure; if most people felt, by election day, that it really was a failure, then it would in fact become one through the defeat of the candidate and the party which had had direction of the war effort. On the other hand, if by election day the war was clearly being won, the Democratic campaign would inevitably come to nothing. Everything depended on the fighting men. If they should start to win, Lincoln would win. He would not win otherwise.